TerraMaster Forum

I was excited to set up my NAS and I was hoping to set it up as just a bunch of disks, but when I saw it wanted to format my disks I backed out because I wanted to make sure my data was safe.

Instead now all 8 terabytes of storage space are gone anyways, taken up by empty partitions I clearly didn't want on there. Years of photos and music just gone, I should have verified the competency of the product before trusting that it's creators knew what they were doing, so it is on me partially.

Has anyone figured out how to restore the old partitions or a good utility for restoring the data without having to scan for 9 days straight?

Where have you used your hard drive before?
If there is data, after detecting the hard disk, it will prompt that the hard disk will be formatted when installing the system. Have you installed the system?
Maybe you can find a data recovery company.

I'm an IT professional, so I'm recovering the data myself, but a poorly designed product wiping data shouldn't lead to support suggesting the purchase of a service that costs more than the product that caused the problem. The fact of the matter is that destructive processes shouldn't occur BEFORE consent to overwrite is given. Why even ask if your device deletes all the data anyways?

I had the drives loaded in on first boot, I assumed that it had some kind of storage for the OS or if it needed to install OS to a disk it would ask me which one, like a sane product would. The product dev team should make sure to have the device ask permission BEFORE DELETING DATA, OR A BIG FAT WARNING taped to the machine or in the instructions, so this doesn't needlessly happen. This is just poor product/packaging design.

There are absolutely warnings to inform users that HDDs would be formatted when installed and initialized in our device.